Saturday, August 15, 2015

Medieval Warfare and the Legacy of Vegetius

In every discussion of Military Theory and its historical
development, gallons of ink are spilled on reams of paper over names like Sun
Tzu, Marshal de Saxe, Antoine Henri Jomini, Carl von Clausewitz, John Boyd, and
many others that echo among the halls of the current military establishment and
academia.One name not mentioned quite
as often as the others is that of the late Roman writer Flavius Vegetius
Renatus.While his seminal work, the De Re Militari[1]
(also known as the Epitoma Rei Militaris),
is often included and studied alongside other great works of military thinkers,
it is rarely ever recognized for having much of a substantial impact at all on
the development of military doctrine in the West.Part of this is due to the fact that the era
in which the DRM had its most
profound effect – the Medieval era – arose centuries after the collapse of the
Empire for whose rescue Vegetius had written it in the first place.A large percentage of military historians
have often treated the Medieval period with vague disinterest or even mild
disgust – seeing it and the warfare that took place in it as unsophisticated,
uninteresting, and riddled with quixotic pageantry that seems baffling to
modern observers.[2]Because of this prevailing attitude, Medieval
military historians are an extremely niche minority.Those who seek to investigate which military
theory informed Medieval warfare and what contributions it passed on to the
future are even more so.And yet, it is
an inquiry that not only deserves to be explored, but holds immense
significance for the study of Western military thought and practice as a
whole.This brings us directly to the
figure of Vegetius.First, this piece
will examine the history and circumstances of both the DRM itself and the man who composed it.Next, it will trace the extensive influence
that Vegetian military thought left upon writers, thinkers, statesmen, and
soldiers from all over Medieval Europe.Lastly, it will examine those actual military developments put into
practice during the Medieval period that issued, either deliberately or
otherwise, from the principles of Vegetius and the DRM.This essay will prove
that the theory of war contained in the DRM
of Flavius Vegetius Renatus served as the primary source for Medieval military
theory and the inspiration for many of the strategic developments of a
crucially dynamic era in European military history.

Before delving into the Medieval reception of the DRM, it is first necessary to
investigate the text itself, the history and sources behind it, and the man who
wrote it.It is widely believed that
Flavius Vegetius Renatus lived and wrote sometime between 383 and 450AD.The honorary appellation of Flavius in his name signifies that he
was a member of the privileged patrician class, relegated at that time of the
Empire to the typical occupation of Imperial court official.[3]He never served in the army himself, instead,
he collected his military knowledge from both his experiences as a professional
bureaucrat and, more importantly, from a wide variety of Roman military writers
from the Empire’s past.[4]Vegetius did not write the DRM for his own musings – he directly
addressed his work for the edification of a current ruling emperor.Most translations have him name a Valentinian
– most likely Valentinian III.[5]However, there are some historians who
believe these translations to be incorrect and argue that he wrote his seminal
work for the more renowned – and more militarily impressive – Theodosius I.[6]So far, no firm resolution has been reached
on this topic.

Vegetius lived at a time when the Western Roman Empire –
the power that had dominated over the entire world encompassing the
Mediterranean Sea for nearly five centuries– was in the final stages of its
terminal decline.After two centuries of
incessant civil conflict between would-be emperors (some of whom only ruled for
mere months before meeting violent ends at the hands of rivals), the famed
legions that had guarded the limes of
the empire no longer possessed even a fraction of their former unity and
cohesion.[7]Additionally, vast movements of migratory
Germanic tribes into the Empire had weakened the integrity of the Imperial
frontiers and irreversibly transformed the ethnic population within, forcing
later emperors to hire these barbarian foederati
troops to man the legions, degrading their quality and loyalty even
further.[8]Vegetius himself mourned the “negligence and
sloth” that had come to characterize the “Roman” legions that were hardly Roman
at all by that time.[9]As he began to turn his mind to matters of
war and the state, the known world of his day was indeed slipping into a truly
dark age – an era defined by the failure of a socio-political order that had
ruled supreme for the better half of a millennium.The DRM
served as a desperate response to the inevitable decline its author hoped he
could remedy.

At the heart of Vegetius’ work was his emphasis on the
military methods and traditions from Rome’s
storied martial past.In the prologue to
Book 1, Vegetius admits that his ideas are in no way his, but rather a
compilation of those who had come before.“One advantage, however, I derive from the nature of this work, as it
requires no elegance of expression or extraordinary share of genius, but only
great care and fidelity in collecting and explaining, for public use, the
instructions and observations of our old historians of military affairs, or
those who wrote expressly concerning them.”[10]For Vegetius, the military methods of the
past held the keys to martial success that might save the Empire from its
impending doom.“Compiled under a
particular set of circumstances,” C. T. Allmand writes, “the DRM represented what were, in its
author’s view, ‘systematized remedies,’ the search for which made him look back
unashamedly to the days when the Roman army had carried all before it.”[11]Many of his muses are mentioned explicitly by
the author – Cato the Elder, Cornelius Celsus, Sallust, Virgil, and the
ordinances of Augustus, Trajan, and Hadrian.[12]Another major source is Julius Sextus
Frontinus – the Roman provincial governor of Britannia in the late 1st
Century AD and a seasoned general who also wrote a treatise on military
science, the Strategemata, which
sadly no longer exists in its entirety.[13]While Vegetius may not have had much military
experience of his own, he sought to compile and present the collective military
wisdom of the past five centuries in one work to rescue his Empire from
destruction.It is this compilation
that, as historical fate would have it, became a unique school of military
thought on its own with far unforeseen consequences for the future of European
military and social development.

Three themes are ever present in Vegetian military theory
– the supremacy of discipline cultivated through regular and rigorous training,
the superiority of infantry armies composed of citizen recruits, and the vital
importance of a unified chain of command at every organizational level.For Vegetius, trained discipline was the ultimate
key to the military success of any army and especially of the Legions of old[14].Almost the entirety of Book I deals directly
with this topic – a topic Vegetius warned that, if neglected, would bode ill
for any state, no matter how secure they think they are.[15]The first step to cultivating this discipline
was to select the proper recruits.Vegetius believed that not everyone possessed the proper physical and
moral qualities necessary to stand firm on the battlefield – he personally
recommended drawing levies from the “country professions,” i.e. young men
already accustomed to hard living and harder labor.[16]Any others were too accustomed to the
pleasures of peace and were unfit in his opinion.[17]Training should be frequent, methodical, and
intense – soldiers needed to know the physical and mental demands of every
action he may face on and off the battlefield.He began Book II by stressing how critically important it was for these
levies to come from the citizenry of the state itself, not from foreign
mercenaries whose only motive was pay.[18]Vegetius saw the occupation of the soldier as
one of a sacred trust between him, God (the Roman Empire of his day had long
since embraced Christianity), and the Emperor for the sake of the common
defense – hence why he advocated that every soldier initiate his service by
swearing an oath of allegiance to the Emperor and the state in the name of the
Holy Trinity.[19]The authority of the state should permeate
every level of the army’s hierarchy of officers, ensuring total unity of
command and maintenance of that vital discipline from the lowest ranks to the
highest.[20]The army must possess the capability to
supply all its needs and wants in any environment, like a “well-fortified city
as containing within itself everything requisite in war, when it moved.”[21]Finally, war was the primary concern of the
state, summarizing his theory on the relationship between the two in his most
famous maxim found in Book III – “He, therefore, who desires peace, should
prepare for war.”[22]

However, the DRM
was not consigned to the fate of mere relic of a fallen empire, but found a new
life of sorts among the “barbarians” in the West, eager for the same secrets to
military dominance that Rome once enjoyed.Western interest in this knowledge contained within the surviving
literature of Antiquity began early, granting them new leases on life in the
monastic libraries that flourished as the West steadily arose from chaos of the
“Dark Ages” and into the social and cultural renewal of the Carolingian
period.Both Alcuin, Charlemagne’s
trusted scholar and confidant, and the “Venerable” Bede of England referenced
Vegetius and the DRM in their
writings on spiritual warfare.[23]It didn’t take long for those with more
military purposes to rediscover Vegetian thought either – Anglo-Saxon records
from the fifth and sixth centuries borrow heavily from terms and concepts
featured in the DRM.[24]Medieval warfare, especially in the early phases,
was defined by what John France labeled “proprietorial warfare” – a style of
war dominated by the strategic concerns of a particular social class, i.e. the
knightly mounted noble, and over which a centralized political authority had little
to no real control.[25]War in this period was a rather loose affair
– the decentralized nature of political power and the intense economic
dependence on agricultural production made it nearly impossible to effectively
raise and command large standing forces for any significant length of time.[26]Armies typically consisted of a small cadre
of professional knightly cavalry bound by complex feudal obligations and
beholden to a strict, almost ritualistic code of chivalrous conduct around whom
congregated motley crews of infantry consisting of both mercenary specialists
and peasant levies – neither of whom were terribly reliable.[27]In what few battles did occur, the massed
charges of the heavy knightly cavalry often carried the day, as dramatically
seen at Hastings (1066), Antioch (1098), Brémule (1119), Montgisard (1177),
Arsuf (1191), and Bouvines (1214).However, as the 12th Century dawned over a Europe
defined by far greater social, political, and economic stability, many
thinkers, statesmen, and commanders began to see the flaws inherent in a
military system so dependent on such unreliable actors and the whims of
decentralized “proprietorial” social concerns.[28]For some, the writings of Vegetius provided
not only solutions, but a blueprint for a whole new system of military thought.

To grasp the full spectrum of the Medieval reception of Vegetian
military thought, it is necessary to examine the writings of the various
authors of military thinkers and leaders who drew their primary inspiration
from the DRM.One of the earliest of those who sought to
apply Vegetian military principles to his current day was the English cleric
and statesman, John of Salisbury.Born
in either 1115 or 1120, John of Salisbury received an impeccably classical
education at the burgeoning university schools in Paris, where his curriculum included vast
amounts of literature from the Classical era.[29]In an era when the line dividing the secular
from the religious in society was far less defined than it is today, John
presided over a long career as a cleric that heavily involved him in the public
affairs of his day, rubbing shoulders with renowned figures like King Henry II
Plantagenet of England and his turbulent chancellor, Archbishop St. Thomas a’
Becket.[30]His career also granted him a front row seat
to the turbulent social and political theatre of 12th Century Europe,
witnessing firsthand the horrific succession crisis in England known
as “the Anarchy” and the subsequent meteoric rise of the Plantagenet dynasty
and their Angevin Empire.This left John
with an insatiable interest in political theory and the proper ordering of the
ideal society, or res publica, as he
called it, which he compiled into his seminal work, the Policraticus.Using many
sources from both Sacred and Classical texts, he featured the DRM prominently in Book VI regarding
military affairs and the state, quoting it directly in multiple places.[31]John’s overall argument was that the army
should fulfill the role of the “armed hand” (armata manus) of society, meant to protect the peace and order of
the state from the depredations of external foes.[32]In order to properly fulfill this role, the
state needed men willing to serve to this end with unwavering loyalty in a
skillful and violent capacity.John
repeats the Vegetian proscriptions for the proper recruitment and training of
troops, the supremacy of discipline, and the supreme importance of the role of
the Prince in commanding the loyalty of this institution.[33]While
it is difficult to discern John’s ultimate purpose in the Policraticus, he was certainly encouraging rulers of his time to
take the step in the direction of exercising unified command over the means of
waging war for the state at the expense of the decentralized and often
rebellious aristocracy.[34]“In his view,” writes Allmand, “the army was
to be seen as the institution which, working with the king, would bolster the
power and increasingly centralized authority of the royal office.”[35]John of Salisbury started Vegetian military
thought on a journey throughout the great minds of the Medieval period that
would have significant ramifications for Europe
as a whole.[36]

Following shortly after John of Salisbury, the next
social luminary to draw directly from the DRM
as a valid basis for military thought was Giles of Rome.Much like John of Salisbury, Giles of Rome participated
actively in public service while also wearing the habit of the Augustinian
Order and served as the personal tutor for the young man who would become King
Philip IV “the Fair” of France.[37]As a young man, he studied under the
intellectual prowess of St. Thomas Aquinas (who was also well acquainted with
the DRM and Vegetian military
thought)[38]
and his Dominican school of Scholastic philosophy, heavily steeped in
Aristotelian ideals that were taking the 13th Century West by storm.[39]On his own in the 1270s, Giles composed a
treatise, the De Regimine Principum,
on the state and political leadership for his pupil and incorporated in it a
great deal of political ideals that demonstrated the rapidly developing
attitudes towards the state and its purpose in Medieval society.[40]Twenty-three chapters in his work deal with
war and the state’s responsibilities regarding it, all infused with Vegetian
thought.[41]Many of the principles Giles touched on were
the same as John of Salisbury a century earlier – the need for disciplined,
hardy, professionally-trained soldiers who fought at the command of a unified
sovereign for the peace and security of the well-ordered state.However, Giles wrote with more of a
contemporary focus than his past counterparts – he sought to take that military
wisdom from the DRM that possessed
relevancy to the warfare of his own time and transmit it to his reader as a
practical methodology for establishing such an army.[42]And Giles was justified in his efforts – at
the time he wrote the De Regimine
Principum in the late 13th Century, many realms in Christendom
were just beginning to discover (and experiment with) the power of unified royal
armies and professional commoner infantry.[43]The Vegetian military thought repurposed by
Giles of Rome acquired a far wider audience than they ever would have acquired
on their own as his work became one of the most widely read political treatises
of its day, gaining attention from noble and commoner alike.[44]

Giles’ unique transmission of the DRM had a substantially wider impact on Medieval Europe than those
who had come before and served as the starting point for a whole host of others
who sought to chime in on military affairs.One of the most notable was the fascinating character of Christine de
Pizan.Defying the misconception that
Medieval women contributed little to the development of social and political
thought, Christine wrote extensively on political theory after leaving her
native Italy with her astrologer father as he served in the court of King
Charles V of France (1364-1380).[45]During Charles’ reign, Christine witnessed
France’s rescue from the complete disaster of the first phase of the Hundred
Years War and the humiliating Treaty of Brétigny forced upon the realm by King
Edward III of England after his son’s crushing victory over Charles’ father,
Jean II, at Poitiers in 1356.[46]In two major works written in the first
decade of the 15th Century, a study of Charles V’s reign
commissioned after his death and a general treatise on war and military law[47],
Christine drew heavily from Vegetian thought as transmitted through Giles of
Rome when discussing the military affairs of her day and what lessons they
could teach.[48]She was especially interested in the lesson
offered by Bertrand du Guesclin – the Breton knight of humble origins who rose
to fame when King Charles’ appointed him Marshal of France and whose Fabian
tactics against the hated English earned him the everlasting gratitude of his
country.“Vegetius, she argued, made no
distinction between social groups, so his ideas should be applied to all who
shared the obligations of defense.”[49]This emphasis on “promotion by merit” became
a very popular idea associated with Vegetian military thought in the 14th
and 15th Centuries in direct defiance to the proprietorial warfare
of older days.As evidenced through the
writings of Christine (although she was by far not the only one), the ancient
military principles of the DRM,
revived and repackaged by Medieval scholars, began to take shape as a consistent
and readily applicable military theory that emphasized “the influence … which
human activity had upon success or failure; the need for order and discipline …
the necessity of promoting only the very best to positions of responsibility in
the army; and the eternal need for vigilance and forethought in a battle of
minds as well as bodies.”[50]

Finally, the legacy of Vegetius and the DRM not only persevered up to the
conclusion of the Medieval era in the late 15th Century, but
actually witnessed a groundswell resurgence of interest in its principles among
Renaissance thinkers, at the forefront of whom stood the iconic Niccolò
Machiavelli.While the man’s political
theory is as well-known as his name, Machiavelli also extensively touched on
the topic of war and its relationship within the republican-type state he so
admired.Machiavelli very much belonged
to the humanist school of Renaissance thinkers and possessed an intense, if not
fanatical devotion for the literature and ideas of Antiquity, which he
incorporated heavily in his thoughts on the state and society.[51]In his Art
of War, Machiavelli’s use of Vegetian military principles is heavy, as in
his insistence on recruiting levies for his citizen army from the country and
“hard” trades, the need for intense and repetitive training, and the supreme importance
of soldiers solely motivated to fight for the good of their state – not for pay
or vain glory.[52]However, Machiavelli never names or credits
his source – possibly showing how universal such principles had become by that
time.In The Prince, Machiavelli more closely merged together his political
philosophy with his decidedly Vegetian-inspired military thought.[53]National armies, drawn from the native
citizenry and drilled into tightly disciplined infantry, were the answer to the
problems in late 15th century Italy caused by the condottieri mercenaries and the inherent
unreliability of those professional “sell-swords.”.[54]In his ideal society, war should be the
primary concern of a Prince – as its very existence depended on the soldiers
that fought for it and his leadership of those troops.[55]“For both men, the soldier was the foundation
of the state: for Vegetius, as the defender of the people’s liberties,
property, and wealth; for Machiavelli, through the role played by the army in
establishing and maintaining proper government.”[56]

Military theories are only so good as the successes – or
failures – that they bring to their adherents on the battlefield and no
discussion about the Medieval legacy of the DRM
can be complete without a look into those strategic developments this
transmitted legacy inspired.One of the
most iconic and impactful examples of this resurgence in Vegetian-style
citizen-army organization was the Assize-of-Arms system of Medieval England.The founder of the system, the dynamic King
Henry II Plantagenet, possessed several deep connections to Vegetian military
thought – his family as far back as Fulk III of Anjou (987-1040) owned a copy
of the DRM and studied it diligently.[57]Possibly motivated by the thoughts of John of
Salisbury (who was highly active in his court), King Henry sought to establish
a more standardized method of recruitment than the mere feudal levies common in
his day.The Assize of Arms of 1180
mandated that all freemen (regardless of social status) should be ready to bear
arms specified to their income level in the event the King called for them.[58]This Assize started a revolutionary series of
military policies that would set Medieval England far apart from her more
feudal Continental neighbors.The civic
character of the Assize was reinforced even more by another Plantagenet warrior
king, Edward I, and his Statute of Winchester in 1285 – which clarified exactly
what weaponry and armor each income level were required to maintain and (for
the first time) established rates of payment for each rank.[59]By the reign of his bellicose grandson,
Edward III (himself an avid reader of the DRM),
the armies of England possessed a decidedly national and professional
character, with archers raised from local shires where they regularly trained
with their weapons by Royal decree and serving in France and beyond under
indentures that paid them the modestly handsome salary of 3-6d a day.[60]“The (English) organization of war,” wrote
longbow scholar Sir Robert Hardy, “had moved into the modern context.”[61]This English military system and the
armies full of professionally-trained yeomen archers and men-at-arms that it
mustered burst onto the Continental scene during the reign of Edward III and
the war he began later known to history as the Hundred Years War.There, the “proto-national” armies of
professional English commoners proved their mettle repeatedly against the
feudal forces of aristocratic mounted knights and hired mercenaries used by
France and nearly every chronicler of that long and bloody conflict attested to
their lethal effectiveness at the great victories of Crecy, Poitiers, and
Agincourt (among many others).[62]

At about the time England waged war with France on the
Continent, a wider military movement slowly gained momentum around the early 14th
Century in reaction to the perceived strategic and tactical weaknesses of
proprietorial warfare dominated by an aristocratic mounted elite.Some military historians call this the
“Infantry Revolution.”While debate abounds
around the term, the fact that a gradual movement away from the knightly
cavalry dominated warfare and towards that waged by professionally trained
commoners (in strong keeping with the admonitions of Vegetius nearly a
millennium earlier) is unavoidable.[63]As early as 1302, disciplined Flemish urban
militias, armed with pike and goededag,
mauled the French chivalry at Courtrai – as they would do many times again
throughout the 14th Century.[64]Similar developments arose in fiercely
independent Switzerland (whose masterfully drilled citizen-soldiers won
Machiavelli’s praise) and in the military Ordinances of Duke Charles “the Bold”
of Burgundy, one of the first Medieval heads of state to openly credit Vegetian
principles as the primary basis for his actual military policies.[65]Even the French, finally goaded out of their
stubbornly-held feudal mindset, finally concluded the Hundred Years War with
England in their favor by adopting their own unique take on the “Infantry
Revolution” – simultaneously professionalizing their armies in the same spirit
as England and successfully integrating a new weapon that finally overcame the
dreaded longbow – the gunpowder artillery piece.[66]

While one can never claim definitively (nor should they)
that the DRM directly inspired the
English military system and the other various installments of the Infantry
Revolution in Medieval Europe, to say that it had no connection requires a
willfully belligerent ignorance.Defying
the collapse of the Empire it was meant to save, the military thought within
the DRM found new pupils eager to
learn from its more universal military principles.It was not the exact circumstances of the old
Roman legions that had made them so formidable on the battlefield, rather, it
was the deeper and more socially integrated concepts of organization,
discipline, and unity of command.As one
traces the reception of Vegetian military thought through the Medieval period,
it is those concepts that carry the most traction and leave behind the greatest
impact – and were ultimately vindicated by the actual historical outcome.Many modern military historians criticize
Vegetius and the DRM for being
“unoriginal” and disappointingly retrospective.[67]However, these historians are failing to take
into account the Medieval experience of Vegetius and his vast influence on the
development of war and society in the West, “since so much of what he expressed
belongs to almost any kind of war, fought at almost any time, almost anywhere.”[68]By investigating the unique transmission of
Vegetian military principles through the various thinkers, statesmen, and
soldiers of the Medieval era, the vast impact of Vegetius and his De Re Militari on both the military
theory and history of Europe is unavoidably clear.